Carl Mungan

• AAPT has started a webpage dedicated to Advanced Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Experiments. Arbor Scientific has collected together a great set of demos and newsletters relevant both to high school and college-level physics at http://www.arborsci.com/CoolStuff/.
  
  
• SPIE has a web portal devoted to photonics resources at http://optics.org/. You can also sign up for weekly email alerts. AIP has a timeline with historical photographs leading up to the discovery of the laser at http://www.aip.org/history/exhibits/laser/. Another nice history lesson of the laser is available from Science News at http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/58499/title/Inventing_the_Light_Fantastic. Finally, Cochin University of Science and Technology in India has a photonics portal at http://www.photonics.cusat.edu/Knowledge Portal.htm.
  
  
• Another web portal offering email alerts is Science360 supported by NSF. It covers all fields of science at http://news.science360.gov/. A well-known portal devoted to educational resources in general is at http://www.merlot.org/.
  
  
• The Institute of Physics (essentially the European counterpart of the AIP) has unveiled a new web platform for its journals at http://iopscience.iop.org/.
  
  
• Harvard's Department of Physics has started a Video Archive of lectures (both recent and historical) by well-known physicists at http://www.physics.harvard.edu/about/video.html. A mathematician has also collected a lengthy set of movie clips at http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/mathmovies/. For example, check out "A Serious Man" for a hilarious snapshot of a blackboard explaining the Uncertainty Principle. (Did you catch the mistake he made in the derivation?)
  
  
• Some well-designed Flash animations for physics are organized topically at http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/physique/perso/gtulloue/index_a.html.
  
  
• There are many Periodic Tables on the web with different special features. Someone had the cute idea of constructing a periodic table of periodic tables at http://www.keaggy.com/periodictable/. Another useful resource is NIST's digital library of mathematical functions at http://dlmf.nist.gov/.
  
  
• Edwin Taylor and Slavomir Tuleja have an interactive explanation of the Principle of Least Action at http://www.eftaylor.com/software/ActionApplets/LeastAction.html.
  
  
• I suppose you know that to get a partial derivative of f with respect to x in HTML you would write

  &part;<I>f</I>&part;<I>x</I>.
  

  If not, consult say http://comers.citadel.edu/math_sym2005.htm.
  
  
• Have you ever thought about going abroad for a year as a Fulbright Scholar? Learn about qualifications and how to apply at http://www.cies.org/us_scholars/us_awards/.
  
  
• A colleague sent me a link to a video at http://www.lsu.edu/pa/mediacenter/tipsheets/oilspill_hydrates_video.shtml of the growth of a white hydrate plug inside a capped tube lowered into escaping gas bubbles from the sea floor, demonstrating why BP's "top hat" approach failed.

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Disclaimer - The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.